The nexus between emergency management, public health, and equity: Responding to crisis, and mitigating future hazards

The nexus between emergency management, public health, and equity: Responding to crisis, and mitigating future hazards

Guest Editors:

Claire Connolly Knox, Associate Professor, University of Central Florida

Vanessa Lopez-Littleton, Associate Professor, California State University Monterey Bay

Tonya E. Thornton, Principal and Founder, Delta Point Solutions, LLC

Biographies:

Claire Connolly Knox, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida and holds a joint appointment with the National Center for Integrated Coastal Research. She is an expert in environmental vulnerability and disaster response, critical theory, and cultural competency. Her co-edited book, Cultural Competency for Emergency and Crisis Management: Concepts, Theories and Case Studies, won the 2021 Book of the Year Award from the American Society for Public Administration’s (ASPA) Section on Democracy and Social Justice. Dr. Knox serves on ASPA’s Pandemic Task Force, Past Chair of the ASPA’s Section on Emergency and Crisis Management, Board Member for ASPA’s Section for Environmental and Natural Resource Administration, and Associate Editor of Natural Hazards Review and Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Vanessa Lopez-Littleton, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Health, Human Services, and Public Policy at California State University Monterey Bay. Her primary research and teaching interests include social equity, and racial and ethnic health disparities, and she has experience in nonprofit leadership, strategic planning, community needs assessments, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and more. Vanessa was recently selected as one of 35 higher education professionals from across the nation to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2021 Emerging Leaders Program.

Tonya E. Thornton, PhD, MPPA, is Principal and Founder of Delta Point Solutions, LLC, an interdisciplinary, social, policy, and administrative sciences consulting firm that utilizes performance management and operational modeling to provide innovative and experienced results. Prior to establishing her firm, Tonya was an Assistant Professor and Director of Grants at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. A subject matter expert for the Department of Defense, Tonya’s area of interest is rooted in emergency management, critical infrastructure, and community resiliency. She is co-chair of the American Society for Public Administration’s Pandemic Ad Hoc Committee. A two-time graduate from Mississippi State University, Tonya has been an active Research Fellow at its Social Science Research Center for 15 years.

COVID-19 Pandemic Task Force

In January 2021, the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) launched the ASPA COVID-19 Pandemic Task Force to serve as a communications channel for expertise and information related to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). The task force was charged with organizing professional webinars, presidential panels, articles, section- and chapter-specific events, policy notes, and an edited volume for widespread dissemination to the ASPA membership and broader field of public administration. This special symposium is an outgrowth of those activities. We now recognize that the pandemic is unique in its severity and breadth, but the lessons of crisis and emergency management throughout history contribute to our understanding, planning, and response to the current pandemic and its appendant social crises. This symposium, then, gives us an opportunity to reflect on the constructs more broadly, with an eye toward conceptual development to inform present and future application to crises of this magnitude.

Introduction:

Disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, but do not impact everyone equally—even in the same jurisdiction. Responding to, coping with, recovering from, and rebuilding after disasters are critical elements necessary for future planning and preparedness activities. Still, there are fundamental questions surrounding ethical challenges and administrative implications. Since 2019, COVID-19 has infected approximately 226 million people worldwide and resulted in the deaths of 4.6 million. Impacting every county and community worldwide, COVID-19 has called into question the appropriateness of emergency management and public health planning and operating protocols and the disconnect that exists between the two. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States “endured an unprecedented 22 billion-dollar” series of weather related disasters in the first nine months of 2021, in addition to COVID-19—a record breaking year for all of the wrong reasons.

We seek proposals for contributions to a symposium on the nexus between emergency management and public health responses, and how equity can and should be addressed within this relationship. Issues of mistrust, inequity, misinformation, and partisan pandering have helped fuel confusion and tension about individual and public safety. While policy responses have varied, the nexus between emergency management and public health has revealed a unique opportunity for exploring efforts to better protect the public.

Emergency and crisis management agencies and personnel have an obligation to protect citizens, including responding to public health challenges without discrimination. Yet vulnerable and marginalized groups around the world, including the elderly, immigrants and refugees, women, racial minorities, and the poor, endure higher infection, hospitalization, and death rates. These same populations face greater threats to other human rights abuses and violations than their less vulnerable or marginalized counterparts. As an example, black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the United States (US) face greater risks of severe illness, hospitalization, and death related to COVID-19 (CDC, 2021; Pareek et. al, 2020). Such disparities undermine trust and legitimacy in emergency management efforts and highlight the need for equity-driven approaches to any crisis response.

As previous emergency management research highlights, understanding the meaning, causality, severity, and incidence of crises, both implied and actual, is essential to the problem-solving process. Given the limited opportunities for crisis-related experience, decision-making models, particularly Community Resiliency Models, have highlighted a need for collaborative partnerships. Increased communication, along with enhanced coordination and strengthened cooperation within and among organizations, as well as with the public, should be recognized as important and viewed as a relevant means to ideological bridge building that aims to strengthen social cohesion and political confidence. This integrated approach is an essential element of managing a disaster or crisis, regardless of the scale or type of hazard, particularly at the local level (Comfort et al 2012; Hu et al 2014; Thornton et al 2021; Myers and Thornton, forthcoming).

With the cascading and compounding impacts of multiple disasters in 2020 and 2021, these elements are being tested at each level of government and across all sectors. While many local governments had a plan to address a large-scale crisis, most were inadequate for a global pandemic. Therefore, local public administrators used bureaucratic discretion to manage this public health crisis. For some local jurisdictions, this placed the administrator in a legitimacy dilemma, caught between the politics of the crisis and the public they serve. Notable examples include supply chain disruptions leading to increased food insecurity problems for minorities, low-income individuals, and the elderly (Clay and Rogus 2021); inadequate response efforts for socially vulnerable and minority populations (Deslatte et al., 2020; Gaynor & Wilson 2020; Wright & Merritt 2020); and varying response efforts being challenged especially between state and local government officials (Carter & May 2020; Dzigbede, et al. 2020).

At the same time, citizens being asked to restrict movement, employment, and economic activity come to question the reliability, legitimacy, and competence of their public officials, particularly when they perceive those restrictions are not evenly applied across groups within the population. Those with low levels of confidence in their leaders to manage the pandemic are less likely to follow instructions to change behavior. Refusals to do so, which come in the form of active defiance, protests, and even riots, then make containing and managing the pandemic even more challenging.

In sum, the purpose of this symposium is to explore intersectoral theories, concepts, issues, and lessons learned at the nexus of emergency management and public health, with an eye on the overlapping consensus of other related professional administrative fields. We are interested in both theoretical, empirical, and practical original research and welcome qualitative, quantitative, and integrative approaches.

Scope of Call:

COVID-19 is the crisis foremost in our minds, but other natural and human-induced disasters inform our basis of understanding. In particular, these events include: the Western Wildfires, the Nashville Bombing, the Tennessee Tornado Outbreak, Hurricanes, Zeta, Laura, and Delta, the Midwestern Derecho, the critical infrastructure impacts caused by Hurricane Ida in the Northeast; and terroristic actions such as the hacking of transportation and supply chain systems that constitute critical infrastructure. Moreover, riots growing out of social unrest add a dimension of complexity that heightens our awareness of fairness and equity. We anticipate papers that explore the following disaster response factors:

  • Examination of the relationship between emergency management and public health in responding to national or international disasters.
  • Lessons learned and case studies for cross-sector local government collaboration.
  • The role of trust, legitimacy, and reputation in responding to disasters or other emergencies experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The politicization of the COVID-19 response particularly for emergency and crisis management, public health, public administration and other related professional fields.
  • Strategies for emergency management and public health in moving forward from administrative intersection to integration.
  • Case studies or lessons learned from:     
    • equitable responses during global or local responses to a disaster or crisis.
    • how local governments strengthen their resilience by building leadership and administrative capacity to better identify and manage risk in the aftermath of a disaster or crisis.
    • how the COVID-19 pandemic altered the interactionary work of local public service delivery professionals with the general citizenry (i.e., street level bureaucracy).
  • An examination or analysis of concepts and/issues in emergency management related to current disaster response.
  • The role of leadership in shaping agency response and citizen compliance and satisfaction.
  • The role of capacity in preparing for and responding to a crisis.
  • The role of evidence and science in preparing for and responding to a crisis.
  • The role of framing, communication, and social media messaging in crisis response.
  • The intersection of policy focused on crisis response and the associated economic crisis.

Timeline:

  • November 30, 2021: One-page proposals (exclusive of references) should be submitted to Dr. Vanessa Lopez-Littleton at vlittleton@csumb.edu for consideration.
  • Invitations to submit full papers will be issued by December 15, 2021.
  • January 31, 2022: Full paper submissions are due to Dr. Vanessa Lopez-Littleton at vlittleton@csumb.edu.
  • February 2022, TBD: Virtual Workshop will take place (via zoom), organized by Delta Point Solutions, LLC, in collaboration with the University of Central Florida and California State University Monterey Bay.
  • April 1, 2022: Full papers are due.
  • April 15, 2022: All qualified papers will be invited by the guest editors to be submitted to PAR. ALL INVITED PAPERS MUST GO THROUGH PAR’S REGULAR PEER REVIEW PROCESS. 

After submission, PAR’s normal internal processes will take over, which guarantees double blind review and offers no guarantee of publication. Authors should leave three months for review and initial decision, three months for revision, and three months for subsequent review. Upon successfully completing the review process, authors can anticipate a print date around three months after that, depending on whether second revisions are required.

References:

Carter, David P., and Peter J. May. 2020. Making sense of the US COVID-19 pandemic response: A policy regime perspective. Administrative Theory & Praxis 42(2): 265-277.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2021. COVID-19: Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups. Accessed September 23, 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html

Clay, Lauren A., and Stephanie Rogus. 2021. Impact of Employment, Essential Work, and Risk Factors on Food Access during the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York State. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(4): 1451.

Comfort, Louise K., William L. Waugh, and Beverly A. Cigler. 2012. Emergency Management Research and Practice in Public Administration: Emergency, Evolution, Expansion, and Future Directions. Public Administration Review 72(4): 539-547.

Deslatte, A., Hatch, M.E. and Stokan, E. 2020. How can local governments address pandemic inequities? Public Administration Review 80(5): 827-831.

Dzigbede, Komla D., Sarah Beth Gehl, and Katherine Willoughby. 2020. Disaster resiliency of US local governments: Insights to strengthen local response and recovery from the COVID‐19 pandemic. Public Administration Review 80(4): 634-643.

Gaynor, T.S. and Wilson, M.E. 2020. Social vulnerability and equity: The disproportionate impact of COVID‐19. Public Administration Review 80(5): 832-838.

Hu, Qian, Claire C. Knox, and Naim Kapucu. 2014. What Have We Learned Since September 11, 2001? A Network Study of the Boston Marathon Bombings Response. Public Administration Review 74(6): 698-712.

Myers, Nathan, and Tonya E. Thornton. Forthcoming. Accountability, Polarization, and Federalism: Oversight During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Emergency Management.

Pareek, Manish, Mansoor N. Bangash, Nilesh Pareek, Daniel Pan, Shirley Sze, Jatinder S. Minhas, Wasim Hanif, and Kamlesh Khunti. 2020. Ethnicity and COVID-19: An urgent public health research priority. Lancet, 385(10234): 1421-1422.

Thornton, Tonya E., Murphy-Greene, C., and Simon, K. A. 2021. Communal Resiliency and Environmental Justice: Examining the Aftermath of the DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill. Journal of Emergency Management 19(1): 79-92.

Wright, James E., and Cullen C. Merritt. 2020. Social equity and COVID‐19: The case of African Americans. Public Administration Review 80(5): 820-826. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13251

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